Review Detail

Reader reviewed by bookworm9

Ben is still dissatisfied with the end of his high school wrestling career even after a year of college, so at the age of nineteen he moves from North Carolina to New Jersey, forging a new identity as a high school junior so he can wrestle again. He's successful on the mat, but his footing is more shaky when it comes to love. After falling for an honor student, Judy, who always shows up for his matches, he's placed in the middle as Judy battles with her parents over whom she should date. Who knew returning to high school could be so tough?

Conifer has an interesting premise, but goes absolutely nowhere with it. The plot (if it can be called that) is no more complicated than I've described it, yet it drags on for 243 pages of pointless descriptions, trivial details, and an ultimatelt pointless ending. Readers are never given sufficient explanation as to why Ben would go to such much trouble just to wrestle again, and other aspects of the story are similarly weak. Ben's reaction to his new school is too overblown, as it seems doubtful that either schools or Ben would have changed so much in the less-than-two-years he's been gone that he would be talking about "back in my day." Ben sporadically confesses to feeling guilty for wrestling younger guys while living as a fraud, yet this guilt is never explored and is apparently easily pushed aside. And although Ben takes offense to the "jock" stereotype, he has no plans or goals beyond the wrestling season and obviously is in no rush to grow up or have a career, since he rewound his life to begin with.

This book was boring and, considering the conclusion and the fact that so many interesting psychological points were never explored, pointless. The characters were cardboard cut outs who evoke no sympathy, and the relationship between Ben and Judy never deviates enough from the usual jock meets brain stereotype to be intriguing. As for the wrestling scenes, which dominate the book, they may be "technically realistic" as Conifer claims, but they're too technical; readers receive blow-by-blow accounts of each match which quickly becomes tedious. Ben wins some and loses some, and in the end it doesn't really seem to matter.

The whole book could use heavy editing, both to pare down Conifer's dense prose and redundant telling, and to fix some technical aspects like misuse and lack of commas and semi-colons, the "annoying" and unnecessary overuse of quotation marks, and the fact that numbers are never spelled out, even when they should be. This was a tedious and amateurish book that even wrestling fans shouldn't bother with.